The pragmatics of figures of speech in teacher - student conflicts: An analysis of selected EFL classroom exchanges in Secondary Schools

The present article analyses the use of figures of speech in situations of conflict in the EFL classroom; it seeks to report how these linguistic devices are exploited by EFL teachers and students to perform a variety of acts during classroom exchanges. In a corpus of 70 EFL teacher student exchanges, we have appraised the use of figures of speech by EFL teachers and students in conflict situations in order to derive semantic and pragmatic meanings from the language choices. As a matter of fact, the present article focusses on figures of comparison as well as figures of exaggeration as used by classroom actors in the context of disagreement with a view to identifying the speech acts they perform in class. By means of direct class observation, 70 EFL classes were observed, recorded and transcribed; the analysis of the selected relevant data was done in accordance with the theory of speech acts and the politeness theory by Austin and Searle 1962 as well as Leech 1983. The findings revealed that in situations of conflict, figures of comparison and exaggeration served the purpose of performing face threatening acts which are undeniable conflict markers.